An Observer investigation reveals the secret war being waged by the entertainment industry against web pirates who threaten its very future.
David Rowan reports
Sunday April 21, 2002
The Observer
On the second floor of a nondescript office building in Victoria, central London, four young men tap intensely into keyboards as phrases such as 'Panic Room', 'Resident Evil' and 'Spiderman' flash up on their monitors. Hooked up to online file- swapping networks such as WinMX and Morpheus, they are searching for 'hot downloads', from films to computer games, that can be theirs free of charge at the click of a mouse.
But unlike the millions of internet users who exploit such networks each day to swap copyrighted material, Jimmy, Bill, Neil and Bruce are online detectives rather than pirates. From this office, among laptops and flashing network cables, they set powerful software agents crawling the net's murkier corners to detect, identify and remove files that should not be there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetne...688022,00.html
- js.